Why Even Mentor?

January 17, 2017

With the start of a new year, January also pivots the beginning of National Mentoring Month and as experts inmentoring and career development solutions, Insala will be providing information encompassing what makes a person a qualified mentor, what makesa successful mentoring initiative, and the benefits that mentoring can bring to your organization.

To begin our series, we explore what are some varying focuses a mentor can take outside of traditional career pathing.

Mentoring can take many different focuses outside of just career pathing. As an example, mentoring inspires new employees, guides the light bulb "aha!" moments and cultivates a higher feeling of engagement within the organization. Another example illustrates that some individuals that have been with the organization for a longer period of time, may not be aware of some of the latest technology advances. Inreverse mentoringit allows possibly new or younger individuals within the organization to act as mentors and provide fresh, innovative ideas and guidance with the buzz of social media.

The legacy that a mentor relationship provides can carry out to the next mentor relationship and very similar to the filmPay It Forward, the knowledge transferred from each other will continue to expand to more people.

Mentoring creates a bond between individuals in certain points in their life and channels information that is often impossible to achieve without experience in the field. It eases the trial and error that can cost an organization more money than wanted. Mentoring relationships provide information that can't be written down or learned during training and is relatively free. It's also proven to work - more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have some sort of mentoring program in place. So really the questions is - why not even mentor?